Orson Scott Card Quotes

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

The biggest disease this day and age is that of people feeling unloved.

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

My sense of loneliness was not particularly great until I reached sixty. From that time on, I would have given an ex-king's ransom if I had been able, in my youth to seduce a lady into thinking of me as a handyman and provider around the house.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.

I'm blessed with a great memory. To be honest, a lot of times, being on my own at such a young age, my memories were all I had. I didn't have many pictures.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

Every station I was at, I never said goodbye - when I was in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Oakland, and L.A. I don't know why.

I used to love the '20s.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others

My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on. I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.

But though first love's impassioned blindness Has passed away in colder light, I still have thought of you with kindness, And shall do, till our last goodnight. The ever-rolling silent hours Will bring a time we shall not know, When our young days of gathering flowers Will be an hundred years ago.

One day you're racing about the business of life, harried but vital, a part of its machinery. Then gradually but inexorably you are left out, until one day you find the machinery tearing along without you - and nobody even notices.

Now I am sober and there's only the hangover and the memory of love.

I grow old though pleased with my memories The tasks I can no longer complete Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past I offer no apology only this plea: When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt That I might keep some child warm And some old person with no one else to talk to Will hear my whispers And cuddle near

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

O Time and change! - with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!

I wanted to tell him that I will never be sorry for loving him. That in a way I still do - that maybe I always will. I'll never regret one single thing we did together because what we had was very special. Maybe if we were ten years older it would have worked out differently. Maybe. I think it's just that I'm not ready for forever.